


Traveling Light

by mimizans



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Tangled AU, fairytale AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 14:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1513991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosette wishes for adventure - and when a girl tumbles through her window one afternoon, she finds out that some wishes do, in fact, come true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Traveling Light

**Author's Note:**

> this has literally been in my tumblr drafts for 10 months and i just had to finally let it go, please forgive me. this is unbeta'd and thrown together, so feel free to point out any mistakes. ps there's the bare bones of a possible plot here if you squint, and i would love to write more in this verse eventually (and lol [here's](http://boobarellie.tumblr.com/post/68034641623/au-meme-traveling-light-eponine-cosette) a graphic made for this AU 6 months ago)

Cosette collapses face-first onto her bed with a heavy sigh, her arms flung out and her eyes shut tight against the glare of the noon sun streaming through the open window of her tower. At the moment she falls, her hair is weightless, as movable and mutable as air, but as soon as her body meets the bed she can feel the pull again, seventy-odd feet of baggage weighing her down.

Her father has gone out, leaving her alone in this insufferably boring tower with nothing to do but read the same three books and cook and sweep and braid her hair and try to find space on the walls for another anatomy drawing or carefully-mapped constellation. Cosette knows that her father loves her, would do anything for her, only wants to protect her from the people who would harm them both; her father has a past that never sees the light of day, and Cosette can still remember the dangerous, covetous looks that she would get from strangers in the marketplace before she and her father took up residence in the tower and locked out the world. (She remembers flashes of a life before that too, but it's a strange mixture of bright glittering spaces and dark, secret corners, of a girl's hand clasped in hers and the sweet smell of the mother she can barely picture. Her father doesn't like her to ask about these memories, but sometimes she has dreams that she is walking the halls of a castle, her dress swishing around her feet and a strange weight on her head, and wakes up feeling that the stones of the tower must be made of nothing more than clouds.)

Yes, Cosette knows that her father loves her and only wishes her safe, yet she can't help but wish for something more out of life than safety. Maybe it's selfish, maybe even wicked, to covet as she does - but, oh, Cosette _does_. She wants leave her tower and never look back, wants to feel the dew-wet grass under her wiggling toes, wants to read every book in every library in the whole world, wants to put spools of ribbon in her hair and dance under the stars and then lie down and map the constellations with her finger, with nothing separating her and the great dome of the sky. Cosette longs for adventure, and as she falls to her bed with a huge huff, she wishes for nothing more than that.

Some wishes, it turns out, are granted. Rather immediately, in fact.

There's a loud crash and a shriek, the still air of the room suddenly alive and electrified, and Cosette scrambles to her feet, making sure not to get tangled in her hair. She barely contains a shriek of her own when she sees the girl sitting on her stone floor, grimacing and rubbing at her knee. Cosette notices that the chest underneath the window has been overturned; the girl must have caught her leg on it when she climbed through. The girl is dressed for climbing, at least; she's wearing dark brown trousers that sit low on her waist and a loose, coarse brown tunic. She's scowling at the chest as if it's personally wronged her.

Cosette gapes for a moment. "What," she says, and the girl looks up at her with dark, intelligent eyes, "What are you doing up here?"

The girl stares at her, and Cosette flushes, realizing what she must be staring at: hundreds of feet of golden hair, pooled around Cosette's feet and spun around the room, lit up by the midday sun. "Right," she says. "My hair. I've just... never cut it," she finishes, blushing even harder.

To Cosette's surprise, the girl gives an unimpressed half shrug and turns from Cosette to peer out the window. "Someone was... following me," she says, and Cosette surprises herself by shivering at the sound of the girl's voice. It's high, and warm, and strangely familiar, like her favorite song from another lifetime. "I was trying to lose them," the girl continues, "and it looks like I have." She smiles, and the curl of her lips is smug, and stands up, brushing off her trousers.

"You're on the run," Cosette deduces, looking the girl over again. She has bits of twigs trapped in her thick braid, the dirt of the road stuck to her like powder on a rich woman, and a battered leather bag she's clutching close to her side, her fingers dancing protectively over the leather. Tingling fear and a surprising rush of sweet adrenaline flood Cosette. "A criminal." 

The girl rolls her eyes and steps further into the tower, her gaze roaming over Cosette's paintings on the walls. "Don't be so dramatic. I haven't killed anyone, if that's what you're thinking. I just may have taken something that didn't, strictly speaking, belong to me."

"Like food?" Cosette suggests, still eyeing the girl's slight form warily. 

"Not quite," the girl says, tipping her face up to Cosette's skylight. Her eyes trace the stars painted there, rendered like the glowing notes of a symphony amidst a great dark swath of sky; her mouth parts slightly and Cosette tries not to feel self-conscious. "Generally," the girl says, her eyes still on Cosette's symphony, "they don't send the majority of the castle troops after someone who stole bread."

" _Castle troops_?" Cosette asks, taking a step towards the girl in her shock. "What in the world did you steal?"

The girl's eyes finally flit down and she smiles at Cosette, wolfish and defiant. "In my defense, it doesn't, strictly speaking, belong to them either." She glances back at the window, her dark eyes calculating. "I think I've taken up enough of your time. Now that I've lost my tail, I'll just be going." Bag still clutched tightly against her side, she heads to the window and swings one leg out, her motions quick and efficient. "By the way," she says, looking back at Cosette, her expression oddly soft, "I love the walls. Did you paint them?"

"Yes," Cosette says with a jerky nod. "I have a lot of time on my hands." The girl smiles at her again, and this time it's almost sad. Suddenly, Cosette is painfully, horribly, viscerally aware of her life stretching out before her, one flat, monotonous desert plain: endless days in this room, reading the same books, looking at the same stars, painting the same walls. This tower may very well be all that she ever knows. But now - oh, but _now_ - she can see a fissure in the wasteland of her future: it's dark and slight and getting further out of her reach with every second that passes, but if she can just reach out and touch it...

Cosette watches the girl turn her head away as if it's happening in slow motion, and as her dark braid swings over her shoulder, Cosette makes her decision.

"Wait!" she says, and the word rings against the stones of her tower like a rifle shot. The girl turns back to Cosette, her eyebrows arched in question. "Wait," Cosette says again. She takes a deep breath. "Can I... can I come with you?"

If the girl is shocked by her question, she doesn't show it; she just studies Cosette for a long moment, as if she's looking for something but doesn't quite know what. Finally, she sighs. "Fine," she says. "But you have to pull your own weight. I am  _not_ getting caught because you, I don't know, get tangled in your hair or something."

"That's not going to be a problem," Cosette says, smiling despite herself.

"Then come on," the girl says, waving Cosette over to the window. "Let's get out of here." She shakes her head slightly, wisps of hair dancing around her ears, burned auburn in the sunshine. "I'm Eponine, by the way."

"I'm Cosette."

"Cosette," the girl - Eponine - repeats, and Cosette knows she isn't imagining the light in the girl's eyes, as if she's just learned a secret. "Nice to see you," she says, soft and odd and familiar.

The girl holds out her hand, and Cosette takes it.


End file.
